603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai. Installed like monitors fed by surveillance cameras, the videos present a voyeuristic entry into a private space, where two teams of men are scurrying around a bed, a desk, and some shelves in to score a goal, represented by a kitchen at one end and bathroom at the other. The game is furnished with complete uniforms, a referee, and a midfield line. Initially, the game appears as a whimsical solution to urban ennui. Yet, as the players shuffle the ball around, recklessly knocking down items in the apartment, the viewer begins to wonder if the indoor game marks the increase of air pollution, and the erasure of green space by real estate development has forced all leisure activity to be conducted in the prison of one’s apartment under surveillance.
Zhang Qing is a conceptual artist whose works deploy a variety of motifs and styles, at times dabbling in gender-bending photography and engaging in endurance-performances. Particularly, Zhang uses humor as an access point to expose the darker sides of capitalism in works such as Don’t Go So Fast (2009), social commentary on the state of economic disparity among social classes. His recent video installation and mixed media works has developed a sophisticated videographic language, exemplified by CCTV (2011) to address issues of state media, surveillance and privacy. Zhang considers China’s socio-political challenges to be unique to its own cultural-historical background and do not always translate or transfer well into foreign contexts. Thus, contemporary Chinese art can provide special visual entries into these complex socio-economic situations.
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...